Willard Romney, nominee of one of the only two political parties we permit ourselves to have, gave a speech to the Clinton Global Initiative on Tuesday morning in which he did not propose an energy source that was debunked 22 years ago, nor did he insult half the country, nor did he ponder the existential question, "Airplane windows, what's up with them?" In other words, he managed to dance through the language while largely staying off his own dick. He even made a joke at his own expense about the effectiveness of Bill Clinton's speech to the Democratic National Convention.

"If there's one thing we've learned in this election season, by the way, it is that a few words from Bill Clinton can do a man a lot of good."

I mean, really, folks. Semi-self-deprecation? Scoreboard!

Which is not to say that Romney's speech wasn't a simple exercise in applying conservative magical thinking to American history. He cited the rise in "real GNP" from 1800 to 1896 and attributed it, through the work of some sausage-maker from the American Enterprise Institute's idea abbatoir, to "free enterprise," without mentioning that while the "enterpise" may have been free in that era, so was a helluva lot of the labor, especially in the South, and especially between the years 1800 and 1865. Romney also proposed his own plan for revamping foreign aid, which, as always, was particularly uncontaminated by details, but which also at least sounded like something a presidential candidate would have.

(Unfortunately, he undermined his message by repeating the idiotic trope that he "will never apologize" for America. At this point, I think it's some sort of nervous tic. He's going to be saying it unbidden to strangers when he's 80 and not know why.)

The overall point here is to rise, however briefly, to the defense of Willard Romney as the Republican nominee. As it happens, I think his wife was right on the money when she took to the radio in Iowa to offer each of the mewling conservatives who have been sniping at her husband a large, steaming flagon of STFU. Seriously, why are Peggy Noonan, or Bill Kristol, or Joe Scarborough — why are these people whose opinions should matter to someone running for president? Because they're on TV a lot? Noonan's demonstrably soft as a grape and Kristol's been wrong about everything for going on two decades now. The Squint's just trying to stay afloat. More to the point — and this is something that Ann Romney would not say, but I will: Every one of the people who are now so horrified at the campaign Mitt Romney is running spent three decades making the campaign Mitt Romney's running absolutely inevitable.

The biggest problem with Romney's campaign is its utter incoherence, which stems from the fact that he had to romance a Republican primary electorate that is clearly demented. The root of the campaign's fundamental dishonesty, which is what has led to its incoherence in the first place, is the fact that the Republican primary electorate forced Romney to renounce the only real achievement he has as an elected politician — the Massachusetts health-care reform. Once you find you have to lie about all the good you did, what does the rest of it really matter?

Where were people like Noonan and Kristol when this dementia was building? Where were they when the Republican Party married itself to crackpot economics and fringe religion solely for the purpose of winning elections? Where was Joe Scarborough? I'll tell you where he was. He was leading the charge by House Republicans to impeach a Democratic president simply because they had the votes to do it. That doomed and useless effort -—Clinton never was going to be convicted by two-thirds of the Senate, even if Monica Lewinsky would had gone down on him right there in front of William Rehnquist — but it did inflame the crazoids in The Base and it helped force Clinton to rule as a sort of Eisenhower Republican. Clinton left office. The crazoids stayed, and got crazier, and the famous thought-leaders who are now so disappointed by Willard Romney did everything they could to make sure that status quo obtained through the 2000 election and the first term of George W. Bush. Only when C-Plus Augustus screwed up everything he touched did the lot of them go over the side, much as they are doing right now.

Sooner or later, there was going to be a Republican presidential field that consisted of the purely insane and One Other Candidate. (It almost happened in 2008, except that you had John McCain and a relatively non-panderish Romney to hold off the propeller-beanie crowd.) It turns out that Willard Romney is now the One Other Candidate, and people are now professing surprise that he couldn't placate the mouthbreathers and then "pivot" to Genuine Conservatism, which, I believe, can be defined today as mouthbreathing with sweeter breath. The greatest politician in the world couldn't do that, and Willard Romney is not the greatest politician in the world. He is, however, the candidate of a political party that has lost its mind at the grassroots. The people who are now so sour on him had their chance to arrest that development over the past 30 years, and they declined. It's a little late to pin their pandering on him.